There’s a fine line between mangling one’s own language and being part of its evolution and improvement. Of course, if it’s us (whoever “us” might be), it’s definitely the latter. “I have lost all ability to can.” …. So I explained the phrase and he seemed fairly disgusted in a what-are-these-people-doing-to-our-language way. My first instinct was to agree with him,… Read more →

Public humiliation visits every retailer occasionally. But to young women who are a bit on the large side, the embarrassment being visited on clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch must be as delicious as a good public flogging.

Sure, language moves on, yada yada, and usage shifts to what people most like the sound of, and “enormity” in particular somehow sounds more erudite than “enormousness”, so many people think it must be a more correct word for something that is huge or immense. Yeah, no.

This 2009 quote from Harriet Jay’s remarkable blog Fugitivus came up in a ManBoobz thread. I wanted to highlight it firstly because it’s marvellous, and secondly to link back to the original post to make it easier for others to cite it.Stereotypes exist pretty clearly to benefit the current social order, and when somebody enacts the stereotype perfectly, it becomes evidence for the stereotype, and when somebody acts in the complete opposite of the stereotype, they are exceptions and also fall into other very convenient stereotypes …

most people can tell by looking at a cat that it doesn’t want their attention; the only thing that makes it hard to figure out whether a woman want[s] to be talking to a man is literally not even trying to.

The world needs a social justice version of John Baez’ classic simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics AKA The Crackpot Index, to rate our never-ending “feedback” from troglodytes of assorted stripes who are convinced that not only are we Doin It Rong but that we deserve to be threatened into silence for daring to have an opinion in the first place.

How did a day that grew from West Virginian Mothers’ Work Days from 1858 onwards (where mothers worked together to improve their community), and Mothers’ Friendship Days from 1865 (to promote harmony between former opponents in the Civil War), become what we celebrate now as Mother’s Day?